Bytedu

I’m not exactly sure what the book was called. The book had to do with how playing video games is actually quite educational for children. I need to find the book again and finish it. The reason I am bringing it up is because it had put interactivity as the top criteria in video games.

Interactivity…

If I understood it correctly, interactivity exists if there are least two parties that are each making actions that induces another action from the other. In other words, it’s the opposite of what you do when watching television. However, I guess you could argue that the brain is accruing a lot of information while watching. The problem is that this isn’t widely accepted as interactivity.

So… interactivity must mean that someone must be physically engaged to be interacting. This would include the act of communicating or even the clicking of the mouse. Going back to the book, the author mentioned how a game must have constant interaction where there should be a response from the user every so many seconds. It astounded me because it was a small number. I was just perplexed of how you could create a video game intelligent enough to keep such a rate going. I guess it’s possible considering how much computers are becoming human-like.

Now, I’m thinking back to my formal education. It felt like a one-way street. The teacher would talk, and I would be quiet and listen. The teacher would occasionally request for some feedback or call on someone to answer a question, but it was seldom. To me, most students were afraid of talking too much. People who talked were easily stereotyped as one of those annoying kids who talks too much. This socially conditioned idea led to the unpleasant struggle within the teacher’s mind. I could just sense it. However, many classes such as ones involving computers and wood working required actually doing the tasks. I recalled enjoying these classes, and getting much out of it. In the big picture, my formal education had very little interaction. This is probably why I viewed it so apathetically.

Going back to video games. Most video games require a constant amount of interaction. You can just see players smash those buttons on the controller constantly. There is pretty much only a maximum of a few seconds delay between each interaction. This short interval really shows its power by just watching how captivated the mind is.

The real challenge is trying to incorporate this element into games that educate as well. One way is to subliminally teach students, by incorporating knowledge as a byproduct. I can see how players learn about civilizations and strategy as they play games like Civilization.

My initial thoughts are that it really depends on the subject that is being taught. You can teach computer related tasks with tutorials, but creative tasks would require a much more open and flexible environment. It’s something I’ll need to research more into.

Until next time, have a great one.

Carl Zetterlund

P.S. Is it possible to create a top selling video games that had the ability to subconsciously teach a child a certain subject?

P.S.S. Could an educational game ever become a best seller or would the buyers reject the product before they even tried it?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.